2014 Governing Council

Community Relations

This position is a relatively new position with a lot of potential. It would be ideal for someone who is eager to proactively reach out to the community representatives as well as look for information about how COSMO can better serve and integrate into the surrounding community. For example, NYP has a community health worker program for patients with diabetes. We referred our patients to that program. Also, Alianza has many opportunities we should be aware of and offer our patients.

Patient Health Education

The chair of patient education will have multiple responsibilities for improving patients’ knowledge on topics such as nutrition, managing diabetes and other chronic diseases, smoking cessation, medication use, substance use, and vaccinations.

Recruiting health educator volunteers from the schools of medicine, nursing, nutrition, and public health.

Conducting trainings on how to be a health educator at clinic to students from these schools.

Planning one health education day for patients at CoSMO per semester.

Being a point person for all students at CUMC who are interested in doing health education related projects at CoSMO.

Keeping the “Patient Education Binder” at CoSMO organized and effective by removing outdated information, adding current information, and making copies as needed.

Contacting health educators after they volunteer to determine how future experiences in the program can be improved

Human Resources – Attendings

This is a critical role on the General Council and it’s a great way to get involved with helping run CoSMO. Plus, you get to meet a lot of the awesome faculty members here at Columbia who volunteer with us!

Contact physicians to schedule them for clinic dates. (We have a list of doctors that volunteer with us regularly, with their email addresses/phone numbers)

Send attendings reminder emails a few days before their scheduled clinic dates.

Relay information between attendings and the CoSMOChairs, invite attendings to CoSMO fundraisers & other events.

Act as a liaison for the volunteer physicians at the General Council meetings. (i.e. provide doctors’s feedback as to how to improve clinic efficiency)

Human Resources – Students

Making sure clinic is staffed with students for each week. This involves opening sign-ups for positions at the beginning of each semester, sending weekly reminder emails to those who have signed up, as well as updating the schedule with cancellations/changes and emailing the list for replacements as necessary.

Making sure students get signed up for CoSMO at the beginning of the year, and getting them set up in our system.

Answering emails for information that come in to hr@cosmoprimarycare.org, regarding requests for information on clinic and/or how to get more involved.

Institutional Relations

The basic job of the IR reps is advocating on behalf of patients in terms of billing and referrals. Specifically, the reps are in charge of the following:

Follow up with Patient Scheduling on referrals made in clinic to make sure each patient receives an appointment. This is done via checking the CoSMO website as well as visiting CoSMO every other week to pick up specialty referrals.

Add referral dates, times, location, and patient information to the website calendar so the associate coordinators can make reminder phone calls to patients.

Reach out to departments that CoSMO patients need referrals for in order to draw up contracts for donated appointments.

Handle patient bills from referrals brought into clinic. Most bills are either hospital bills or from departments we have contracts with, so they are easily waived. For those that are not, IR reps work with the department and client to see if the bill can be reduced/fee-scaled, waived, or paid via a long-term payment plan.

Information Technology

The CoSMO IT chair is responsible for maintaining and supporting CoSMO’s two public web sites (custom ASP and WordPress), Microsoft sharepoint (for internal use), and related computer resources including the patient database, referrals database, etc. The IT chair should also be able to help design and implement new IT initiatives that make CoSMO run more smoothly. No prior experience is necessary, however a background in IT or programming is helpful, and interested applicants should at least be “computer savvy”, have a basic knowledge of HTML, and rudimentary knowledge of the workings of ASP.net and SQL (however no actual programming knowledge is required).

Quality Assurance

As the Quality Assurance chair, you will compile data from patient visits to see how well CoSMO is doing and how we can better serve our patients. You produce descriptive statistics related to clinical care, therefore you should have an understanding of clinical health maintenance guidelines or be willing to learn about quality health indicators such as diabetes control and cancer screening guidelines. The results are presented at the quarterly CoSMO board meeting and are instrumental in identifying areas of improvement for CoSMO. You will be expected to lead a quality improvement committee and work with this group to develop interventions based on problems identified through data analysis, then evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions. Areas for development: (a) update the metrics we use for evaluation (b) compare our stats to current Medicaid performance (c) take advantage of CoSMO switching to EMR to make our QA more sophisticated (d) involve the quality assurance committee in conducting patient outreach as needed as well as providing clinical “flags” in patient charts when you identify that a patient is in need of a service, eg “patient is due for mammography”.

As secretary, your responsibilities including taking minutes at General Council meetings, Advisory Board meetings, and Clinic Flow meetings. You are also responsible for posting the meeting notes to Sharepoint as well as emailing a meeting summary to the governing council. As necessary, you will be responsible for updating the club constitution for the P&S club database at the start of the year. You also get to organize the end of the year awards ceremony.

CoSMO is NOT currently accepting new patients…

Unfortunately CosMO is at capacity right now, please check back on our site in a few months!

CoSMO Photography Auction

Check out the photographs available for this year's auction!

Donate!

The CoSMO Clinic is a student run free primary medical care clinic for uninsured adults of Washington Heights and Harlem. We need your help in order to continue providing high quality care to our patients and to offer unique and valuable clinical experiences to students of Columbia University Medical Center. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the CoSMO Clinic by following the instructions here.

Contact Us

If you are a patient with an emergency, please proceed to the nearest emergency room for care. Otherwise contact us here.